‘White Noise’ Is the Sound of Disappointment

In its broadest outline, White Noise is a story about a blended family whose lives are briefly but profoundly uprooted by an “airborne toxic event” caused by a chemical spill outside a small Midwestern college town. The resultant pollution threatens to turn the heartland into Three Mile Island (the book was published the year before the meltdown at Chernobyl, giving its disaster elements an uncanny prescience). Forced to evacuate their home alongside their neighbors and sequestered together in their wood-paneled station wagon, DeLillo’s protagonists spend much of the novel under a literal cloud of fear—a condition that puts a witty spin on the post–World War II cliché of a “nuclear” family.